A new era of work

Video calls are now part of everyday life — more than ever, given recent events.

Yet the basic design of a business video call hasn’t changed since Bell Labs demoed the Picturephone at the 1964 World’s Fair. It’s still essentially a telephone with a camera. Why is nothing changing? Because the UX has to be compatible with legacy room conferencing installations, TVs on walls, and expensive old-world accessories.

Perhaps that works fine for a workplace designed around corporate offices and a culture of “status update” meetings.

But there’s a bottoms-up counterculture brewing in business. Modern B2B software needs to be light on its feet. Generation Slack doesn’t meet so much to give status updates. It meets to fire up Sheets, Airtables, Figmas and Notions and quickly get stuff done, multi-player style.

Video calls need to reflect this new way of working. That’s why we took video and made it less. Less traditional, less formal, less bulky, even less realistic. Less about blowing up people’s faces on a 70-inch HDTV, more about focusing and doing. Around is there for a quick session to supercharge all future-of-work applications. It’s just enough to be present but makes space for what’s important: the task at hand.

Our sophisticated, AI-assisted audio technology developed over a period of 2 years completely transforms the possibilities and dynamics of a video call. Dedicated conference room equipment is no longer needed, and Around’s focused UX makes video calls fast and productive.

This decade will completely transform our ideas about how work happens, and with $5.2M in funding, we are excited to be partnering with amazing investors from Floodgate, Initialized Capital, Credo Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Ryan Hoover, Tommy Leep and others to spearhead a new era.

Get around and get going: https://www.around.co